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Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

nytimes.com

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Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#511

Post by bdangubic »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #510
raldi wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Four years ago highly-upvoted /r/SanFrancisco comments said self-driving taxis were decades away: https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/nbjsij/real_r...

12 upvotes... You can't compare that to gene-editing treatments, that's two completely different level. Self driving car were always almost feasible, 20 years ago top gear made cars you could drive with controller like kids do with toy cars. We already had camera and computer, it was just a matter of raw CPU performance and software development..

we have all the CPU performance we need and all software development we need and self-driving cars are driving around in roughly 0.00785% of world’s cities :)

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#512

Post by something098 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #496
something098 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes - few million of them. Simple task for sure, if the liver is functioning as testes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34925145

This is something I have never seen for decades - a troll that posts links to his own quotes...

We met again.

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#513

Post by burnt-resistor »

dmurray wrote: post #344
burnt-resistor wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Circa 2005, Stanford FTEs had nine (9) health insurance plan choices. ;P

Is that better or worse than having one really good one?

;) Paradox of choice potentially, but allowed choosing something other than Kaiser Permanente (HMO with own facilities and doctors) such as a PPO option.

What America really needs is an NHS not tied to employment or exploited by fraudsters delivering worse care for profit. Human rights shouldn't be perks of employment.

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#514

Post by heavyset_go »

Gareth321 wrote: post #415
mike_hearn wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You remember correctly. Moderna had a lot of problems with their drug trials due to the lipid nanoparticles they were using to transport mRNA. They were toxic to the liver upon repeat dosings. Unfortunately, it appears they never found a fix for the problem. Instead they gave up and found a "business solution" by pivoting from drugs to the (at the time) less profitable vaccines, on the grounds that vaccines are somet…

> on the grounds that vaccines are something you only need to take once so the toxicity issue could be dodged But we didn't take these vaccines once. We took many of them. Am I to understand a known side effect is liver toxicity for multiple doses?

Toxicity depends on dose. COVID vaccines just need micrograms of material to induce an immune response, I imagine it takes more than that to edit the genes of a large organ.

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#515

Post by burnt-resistor »

zharknado wrote: post #324
bglazer wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germline gene editing is still considered risky and unethical. That is, editing cells that form eggs and sperm, thus changing the genome of some of the descendants of the edited person. This is somatic editing. These edits will not be inherited. Somatic editing is becoming more common (see Casgevy) but there are technical hurdles that prevent its application to many cases.

> This is somatic editing. These edits will not be inherited. Genuine question- how do we know that? Is it just that the edits are very improbable to accumulate in the gonads in sufficient quantities to persist? We can’t actually prevent some fraction of them from reaching other parts of the body, right?

I'd like to know that too. When a gene therapy is administered to a person after birth, what % of cells get the edit and with what approach(es)? Doesn't that also edit oocytes and spermatocytes too?

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#516

Post by wffurr »

kulahan wrote: post #504
wffurr wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> They are not used because somehow all countries pretty much agreed they’re way TOO effective and horrific That’s the story but it doesn’t hold up. Chemical weapons were used as recently as the Syrian civil war. I also think if they were really effective in modern warfare, Russia would have long ago deployed them in Ukraine. More here: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

What do you mean “if they were really effective”? We still hand out CBRN gear and train in how to put necessary parts on in seconds, because that’s often how little time you get before you’re permanently incapacitated. Mustard gas alone should prove this, and that’s an OLD chemical weapon. Nowadays we have riot control agents that can be tailored to demographics, react more violently in the presence of sweat, or cont…

I'd encourage you to read the article. Chemical weapons are effectively useless against a well-trained "modern system" army. Part of that is the chemical warfare equipment and vehicles, but mostly it's cover-and-concealment. If you can actually find the enemy, it's much faster and simpler to use the other vastly destructive munitions that modern militaries have.

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#517

Post by skeaker »

Lichtso wrote: post #501

Not to downplay what a huge achievement this is and how far the field of medicine has come, but ... this still leaves a slight bitter taste in my mouth: If they edit specific genes one way they can also do the opposite direction. And if I understand correctly, they did with a bunch of lab rats? Now, this and similar stuff have obviously been discussed before, essentially "12 Monkeys": Somebody releasing some runaway…

If you wanted to do that you could just release a cancer-causing agent and it would similar mess with their DNA and kill them much more effectively at a fraction of the cost. Or just blow them up or something. Harming the masses in such a roundabout way won't leave the realm of science fiction because it is so much less effective and so much more difficult to do than existing methods. Not worth worrying about even in theory.

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#518

Post by harhargange »

MrZander wrote: post #11

> To accomplish that feat, the treatment is wrapped in fatty lipid molecules to protect it from degradation in the blood on its way to the liver, where the edit will be made. Inside the lipids are instructions that command the cells to produce an enzyme that edits the gene. They also carry a molecular GPS — CRISPR — which was altered to crawl along a person’s DNA until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be c…

I work on lipids and i myself didn't know they could be so much practically important.

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#519

Post by _bin_ »

boroboro4 wrote: post #507
_bin_ wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We "invest" more than almost anyone. 38% higher than the OECD average. I don't find discussions about throwing more money at the problem to be constructive so much as a way to ignore other issues at play. I don't really see how this affects e.g. what I do for my children. I will absolutely be turning them into the closest to superhuman the current state of treatments lets me, traveling internationally if I need to. I…

I don't mean to invest as to spend more money, rather to spend money better and in a more equal way. While USA spends a lot of money on education I don't think it translates in better education on average. Even if this was beneficial for the society in general. I am, afraid, that this kind of genome modification will further increase divide in a society and turn social lifts off even more. I.e. it's not gonna be your…

You will have a really hard time convincing Americans to keep paying high taxes while funding is pulled from their children’s schools and redistributed to inner cities and ruralia. My observations suggest the problem for the latter isn’t financial.

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#520

Post by floam »

duskwuff wrote: post #139
buzzy_hacker wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Made me think of It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo—DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA—was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code contain…

>> Imagine a flashy spaceship I misread this as "fleshy" for a moment, and the quote almost works better that way.

Me too. It did. Huh.
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